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Wakamaru Sakamitsu
'Wakamaru Sakamitsu '(nicknamed Maru) is a main character in The Island and the Sea, the third book in the series, as well as Sakamitsu's younger sister. In hopes of finding her brother, she has travelled a long distance from Okinawa to Kyoto, mostly by train, to achieve her goal. Thus she is mostly associated with trains and the railway. Appearance In her first appearance, Wakamaru appears as a young girl with short, messy dark brown hair, slightly tan skin, and brown eyes. She wears a black hoodie with an image of a smiling shisa and the kana "Uchinaa" (Okinawan for "Okinawa") underneath it. She also wears loose jeans and black Converse sneakers. Background Ever since the Sakamitsu family got rid of their unwanted firstborn Wakamoto, they had been diligently praying at the local shrine for one more child - a normal, happy child, unlike their first, who beared such an uncanny reseblance to someone who they wished to forever forget. Their wish did not go unheard, and one year after this, Wakamaru was born. The family, overjoyed at their new daughter's birth, spoiled her greatly, buying her whatever she wanted, and taking her to the best places in the city on occasions like her birthday or elementary graduation, for example the Churaumi Aquarium, which she has been to four times (see Trivia). When she reached the age of 12, Wakamaru was transferred to a new school in hopes that she would recieve a better education. The prestigious new school, having high expectations for all of its students, required each and every one of them to learn a musical instrument as well as a sport. Wakamaru asked her friends what instrument they hoped to learn, and recieved the same answer from all of them: the sanshin. Not only was it a unique Okinawan instrument, it had also gained quite a lot of fame - not just here, but in all of Japan - because of the famous sanshin player, only a year older than them, Sakamitsu, who supposedly lived in Kyoto and gave performances in the summer at a local mountain resort there. Interested in the mysterious figure, and even more so due to the fact that they had the same last name, Wakamaru went home and began gleaning the Internet for information of him, until at last she found a photo, allegedly taken when he was but a year old, with none other than her parents sitting on either side of him. Her curiosity growing, Wakamaru confronted her parents about him and the image she found, to which they mysteriously refused to say anything about. Even more curiously, they beseeched their daughter to choose another instrument to learn, and confisticated everything she could use to access the Internet from her. This did not, however, stop Wakamaru from staying at the school library and going online there. Over the course of a week, Wakamaru came to know that Sakamitsu's biological parents were, indeed, her own, and that he had been abandoned by them and taken in by another family. She had a brother she didn't even know about. Desperately wanting to see him, Wakamaru started devising a plan to sneak out from home and go to Kyoto in hopes of finding her brother, who wouldn't be hard to find, because he spent holidays in the Yukizan Mountain Resort, the most prestigious hotel in the Kansai region. Secretly purchasing a plane ticket and everything else she needed from three sources - the cash she had recieved as a prize for recently winning an art competition, her own pocket money, and a few thousand yen she secretly took from her parents - Wakamaru prepared to leave on the night before Christmas, on which day she knew her parents would be out until late. She was successful in her leaving, and after writing down a note to inform her parents of the reason of her departure - she took a train to the local airport immediately and boarded the plane alone to Kansai. From there, though with difficulty, she slowly but surely navigated her way through Kansai's complex train systems and finally made it to Yukizan. She got her wish - she finally saw the brother she had been longing to meet ever since she first heard his name, yet, this wasn't the way she hoped everything would turn out... Personality Relationships = Likes and Dislikes Quotes Trivia * Wakamaru's name is a reference to Dojimaru, the son of Shutendoji according to folklore, symbolising her relation to her brother, whose name has a similar set of kanji. * Atsu came up with the idea of her and her backstory while listening to Kyounosuke and Gosamaru's cover of Sakura Zensen Ijo Nashi on the MTR. * Wakamaru has been to the Okinawa Churaumi Aquarium four times.